Five of the biggest tech fails ever, and a girl's arse winning a prize

The launch of the much-hyped iPhone 5 probably hasn’t quite run as silky-smoothly as Apple would’ve liked.

Firstly, the tech giant’s decision to dump Google Maps from the new device in favour of their own Apple Maps app backfired when it became apparent that their brand-new offering was riddled with barmy, baffling, I'm-going-the-wrong-way errors.

It then emerged that the iPhone 5’s operating system was costing some users a small fortune, as it was downloading content via 3G, even when Wi-Fi was enabled – thereby whooshing users way over their data allowances.

Whoopsy. Steve Jobs must be spinning in his (beautifully designed) grave. Still, Apple aren’t alone in effing-up on a grand, global scale – here are five more classic tech mega-clangers...

1. Due to a “core switch failure” at Blackberry headquarters in 2011, BBM users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and South America found themselves locked out of their favourite messaging service for just over three days. How many millions of LOLs tragically went unLOLed? We may never know...

2. 2007's Vista was intended as the successor to Microsoft’s all-conquering Windows operating system. It flopped like a grandpa fart, however, because users found it incredibly annoying that it repeatedly asked, “Are you sure you want to do that? Reeeally? Are you absolutely suuure?” every single time they wanted to do anyfuckingthing at all.

3. Released in 1994 for the SNES, Mega Drive and Amiga, Rise Of The Robots was the most buzzed-about videogame of the year. Excitable previews in gaming magazines ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the revolutionarily pretty graphics – unfortunately, it turned out that the game itself was so spazzily programmed as to be unplayable. Cue lots of angrily flung joysticks and stomping journeys back to game shops.

4. The most recent version of Firefox (that’s Firefox 16, web-browser fans) featured a gaping security flaw that allowed dodgy websites to capture users' entire browsing histories (yep, even those ‘Start private browsing’ histories), and then use them for malicious ends. “Give us £200 or we’ll tell your missus you visited fatgirlsbumholes.com!” – that kinda thing.

5. In terms of social-media sites, Facebook is still very much the big dawg, but it has shot itself in the knackers somewhat with its controversial timeline redesign, with ‘user engagement’ down a reported 53% since its launch. Click to Unlike...